The Plight of Italian Secondary Education

The Plight of Italian Secondary Education

 The Plight of Italian Secondary Education is getting worse and worse because the economic recession has led to a recession of democracy. Teachers in Italy are so subdued because they have lost all hope, and this the effect of 38 years of class war against the Italian school system. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Teachers and students were questioning authority and were asking questions they were not supposed to ask, they were not just accepting everything that was handed down. There was an excess of democracy in the whole society, even in the unions. The young were not being properly indoctrinated by the school. So the educational system moved toward more control, more indoctrination, cutting back on dangerous experiments with freedom and independence. This war against a democratic school system started in 1975 with The Decreti Delegati, a bill authorizing the government to pass school legislation meant to democratise the school but which was really a way to lower educational standards, teacher’s morale and wages. The schools was expected to contribute to the indoctrination of the elites, to make sure they have the right ideas and know how to serve power but in the late 1960s that started slipping out of hand. The school system was out of control and even the elites were coming into contact with radical ideas. That had to be changed, the quality of teaching in public schools had to be debased and the elites were to attend private schools which kept them isolated from the changing society.

 The elite needed a subdued, docile workforce and mass public education was introduced to train a largely rural population to follow instructions and obey. Carlo Levi describes peasant’s children, going through public elementary education in Southern Italy, who do not learn anything and who are supposed to think they are stupid, powerless and can’t do anything. Teaching had to be boring and repetitive. If you take away from teachers the freedom to innovate, and you transform them into powerless executors who take orders, you have found the best way to make sure teaching is a soulless repetition of the same. Teachers forced to take orders are degraded, they are treated like a machine. The new computerized automation of teaching is designed through the school system to demean, degrade and de-skill teachers and their students. School policies have increasingly tended to marginalize teachers so that they do not interfere with decision making, teacher are expected to teach their students to do the same. Taking power out of the hands of teachers has turned them into mindless tools of production. Degraded and obedient teachers make students stupid and passive. Both teachers and students are supposed to forget about their rights, feel powerless and say: “Okay, I am degraded. There is nothing I can do.”

 The Television has taken over the task to educate the population. Italians watch TV longer than most Europeans and many foreign intellectuals have noticed that the amount of brainwashing in Italy is superior to that of any other country. Try and ask your students about Berlusconi!

 Just when the Decreti Delegati were passed, the Italian government was building a huge debt which was part of a scheme to cripple the welfare system and which would have forced future governments to cut down funding to the Italian school system. They put the country so deeply in debt that there would be virtually no way for the government to pursue school funding programs any more. Of course the propaganda system inverted the cause with the effect and we were told that debt was inevitable, that it is important to pay it back, that it is impossible to pay it back and that now we have to cut down school spending. The underfunding of Italian schools was a response to the school system teaching virtues inimical to the corporate system and profit, like solidarity and care. The elite also reacted against the influence of teachers who were asking the youth to think in a creative way and who were contrasting the brainwashing taking place on the media. Clearly teachers had to be silenced and no independent and open political education should take place in schools. Political propaganda became even more prominent on television and people would only get distorted information from TV and other media. Only a small spectrum of opinions was allowed and methods were devised to make sure School did not interfere with this.

 Schools are expected to induce docility and passivity. Instead of being places where you see teachers fomenting rebellion against authority, schools should teach the importance of reverence to it. The television became the ultimate authority, teachers were presented as the representatives of all what you hate in the state. Italians hate the state even more than Americans hate the federal government. Hatred of big government had to be rammed into the minds of US citizens. In Italy it was not necessary. There is a long tradition of passive resistance against the state and, at the same time, of resigned acceptance of the inevitability of its oppressive and bureaucratic ways. It was enough to show the public teachers as new representatives of state power. The public rage was diverted and ever since parents haven’t stopped to act in a self-destructive way against teachers and schools. Families tend to back the antisocial attitudes of their children and press teacher to get higher marks for their children. When their self-destructive task is over they will be put in line like any other. The school hierarchy will tell them: “Look we gave you democracy and power and you have destroyed schools so now you understand that we cannot allow you too much democracy. We know better and you must obey.”

 Teachers have become the target of the centuries old disgust with public institutions. Welfare and schools have been successfully demonized. Indeed teachers were caught in a trap and the only way to avoid this was to renounce all power, and indeed very few students fail their school year in Italy. This, of course, has led to a dramatic decline in quality. The next step is a principal saying: “well you parents see what you have done to the school system with your protests and pressures, you have destroyed the system, you have destroyed the opportunities of your children to get decent education. You are too self-destructive, you need guidance. You wanted us to terrorize teachers and we did that, they can be sacked for any reason like any other slave-wage worker. But now you must accept a certain degree of terror which will teach your children to abide by the rules and to obey.” Parents’ interference with teaching methods, and even the syllabus, has lowered teacher’s status and this has been in the interest of the system. Teachers are debased intellectuals whose role has always been to marginalize the public, to get people away from power. If we tell the public that teachers are communist enemies, teacher will tend to marginalize parents and so parents will put pressure on teachers debasing their role and function even more. Principals have been asked to act in an increasingly autocratic way to marginalize teachers because in this way teachers will tend to marginalize students and parents as well.

 The school system has to impose mental slavery so children will accept the framework of media indoctrination and won’t raise any questions. The media don’t want teachers to interfere with their work. The crucial doctrines the news broadcasts repeat again and again should never be questioned at school. Television drums certain fixed boundaries of thought into your head, which certainly dulls the mind and is a prerequisite of repetitive boring learning at school. In Italy both the right and the left have reduced the freedom of teachers and have diminished their status to that of slave-wage workers. In the US you can devise the same trend: No Child Left Behind under Bush and Race to the Top under Obama, despite what they may claim, basically require schools to teach to the test. They control teachers and make sure they don’t move in independent directions. This is a step toward imposing a business model. Students are required to conform, to memorize to pass the next test. And there are punitive measures to keep teachers in line if students don’t get a high enough grade on the test which, by the way, could mean they are creative or independent. The Finnish educational system is one of the best in the world because teachers are respected. They put energy and initiative into their work. They are given a good deal of freedom to experiment, explore, let students search on their own.

 Italian schools have increasingly become hierarchical and teachers are at the bottom level. In practice they don’t have a say anymore and the Assembly of the Teachers (Collegio dei Docenti) has lost its role because teachers are rammed through the next vote about matters which are clad in a bureaucratic language which makes sure they do not understand anything about what they are voting. The system is set and they must obey. Teachers have lost control over what they are doing and so they are passively executing orders. Principals and Teachers may feel freer if they know they are not responsible for what they are doing, they may well be contributing to a new fascist regime in Italy but they can still say they were just obeying order as the Nazi criminals did. The fact Schools tend to imitate the fascist system of the corporations is considered a great achievement toward more competitiveness.

 More controls over teachers were greeted with enthusiasm as the end of privilege in the public sector and a sign of efficiency. In corporations and schools, some at the top take decision and the hierarchy passes them down until they reach the lowest level who must obey without asking too many questions. The most totalitarian institution in human history is a corporation. It is a centrally-managed institution in which authority is structured strictly from top to bottom. The Italian school system is technically becoming a fascist organization of enormous power. Why should the principal’s delegates in a department tell you what kind of work you are going to do? It isn’t any better than in the Middle Ages when you had a king telling you what kind of work you were going to do. If you are inside the organization you take orders from above and transmit them down. But a teacher should be teaching that every form of authority and domination and hierarchy, every authoritarian structure, has to prove it is justified and he should tell his students that it has no prior justification. Schools have become similar to corporations and are essentially totalitarian in character: teachers have been transformed into a cog in a big machine. Capitalism basically wants people to be interchangeable cogs in a machine. Teachers are a cog teaching students to be a cog.

 There is no sense in changing classes every year. How can you justify the need of putting a teacher in a different class every year? It is just a way to debase the profession, to make you think you are a powerless cog. A sense of insecurity about the classes you are going to teach the following year is designed to make you feel you are interchangeable. It enhances managerial control which makes teachers more inhuman and therefore more controllable. Principals tend to select automation even when it cuts back on learning standards just because it gives them more control over their teachers. Subdued teachers are another aspect of the culture which makes indirect propaganda about what a “proper” life and a “proper” set of values are. Depressed Teachers are part of the indoctrination of the young. It is extremely important to drive human sentiments out of teachers if you want them to be passive, obedient and under control.

 There is now a strict hierarchy and a top-down control in Italian schools. A hierarchy of teachers with executive functions and the principal’s delegates are supposed to control that the will of the powers above be respected. The point of this ideology is to prevent teachers, who are outside the sectors of coordinated power, from associating with each other and entering into decision-making. The point is to leave the powerful sectors highly integrated and organized, while atomizing everybody else. All teachers in Italian schools are afraid of openly questioning the decisions they don’t agree with and sometimes even don’t understand. Another strategy to demoralize teachers and reduce their status consists in making them completely passive executors. In many cases, Teachers are not free to choose their textbooks with the excuse that they have to adopt the same books so that anybody can take over the next year. In some cases teachers have to use books which don’t question the mainstream framework induced by the business community. It is not a surprise that in the dangerous period after World War II about a third of textbooks in American schools were simply provided by business. The amount of bias of Italian textbooks seems incredible if you assume an independent viewpoint.

 The whole educational and professional training of teachers is an elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, who think for themselves and don’t know how to be submissive. So by the time teachers become headmasters they have learned to avoid being dysfunctional to the institution and have internalised the values of the system. Teachers have always internalised the values of the business community and they know that there are certain things you don’t say, and in fact, you don’t even think about them anymore. All head teachers believe in the things they say and they made it through because they do. It is very hard to live with cognitive dissonance: only a real cynic can believe one thing and say another, it is better to think you are free to do what you are told you must do. Nobody tells a head teacher what to do but if he didn’t know what to do he wouldn’t be considered a successful executive and his career would suffer. Think the wrong thoughts and you are not a successful member of the system. So head teachers, their delegates and simple teachers tend to be either very obedient or very cynical. The obedient ones have adapted, they have internalized the values, they think they are free and believe what they are saying, otherwise they wouldn’t have made it that far. But there are also some plain cynics.

 Charter schools both in Italy and in the U.S. have been part of the effort to destroy the public educational system. They don’t have any better outcomes but they are much more under private control, essentially privatized. The educational system is being degraded for the general population but you have a private education for the rich and the privileged. At first business elites were interested in public education. Ralph Waldo Emerson speculated that you must educate people to keep them from rich people’s throats. Unless the mass of the population is properly educated they will come after the rich but a free education engenders creativity and independence and so people will come for your throat because they won’t want to be governed. So the rich thought: let’s have a mass education system that inculcates obedience, subordination, acceptance of authority, acceptance of doctrine. This approach to education trains you to follow orders, even meaningless orders. Wilhelm von Humbold described the other type of education: it should be like laying out a string that the student follows in his own creative and independent way, learning how to learn. It doesn’t matter what we cover, it matters what you discover. Students should learn how to discover.

 The whole school curriculum is tolerated only so long as it continues to perform its institutional role. So now the next move is to make single schools dependent on public funding: as long as they serve the interest of those sitting above they’ll be funded, if they stop serving those interests, they’ll get into trouble. If schools want to get more money they have to become more bureaucratic and, above all, they must stifle any teaching environment where students are thinking independently and are asking questions. Education in the technological age ought to be some sort of variant of Marine Corps in which you just march students through a canon of “great thoughts” that are picked out for everybody. These thoughts are imposed upon students and they end up knowing and understanding virtually nothing.

 The growing pupil indiscipline in Italian schools is part of the scheme to bring the public institution to its lowest level and then you can expect them to ask teachers to devise methods to impose discipline and to turn students into automata. Schools are supposed to provide an ideological service selecting students for obedience and conformity. In American schools nobody really cares if your marks are low but if you come to school three minutes late you are sent to the principal’s office. The values of this kind of school are the same as those of the assembly line. The important thing is to be able to obey orders, and do what you are told and be where you are supposed to be. The values are: you are going to be a factory worker or a university professor but anyway you are going to be following somebody else’s orders and just doing your work in some prescribed way. What matters is discipline and not figuring out things for yourself. Schools are being asked to reward discipline and obedience and punish independence of mind. You are not supposed to think, you are supposed to obey. If you ask too many questions you are going to get into trouble and you are going to be beaten down.

 The Invalsi test in Italian schools is a way to introduce an extremely competitive system because that is one of the best ways of controlling people. Emphasis on foreign languages certification is another means to transform teaching into an easily controllable routine. All teachers will be ranked and will have to beat down the colleague next to them. It is crucial teachers do not feel solidarity, it is crucial they compete and they fight each other otherwise they could even seize control of their schools transforming them into democratic institutions. The institutional role of the schools for the most part is just to train people for obedience and conformity, and to make them controllable and indoctrinated. As long the schools fulfil this role they will be supported. If teachers and students break out of line they are weeded out or beaten back in all kinds of ways.

 New bills have completely privatized the working relations in Italian schools. Teachers can be fired and, as usual, this was considered a great advancement towards the end of public sector privilege but this is just a way to scare teachers and make sure they do not train their students for creativity and disobedience. I think very few teachers dare speak their mind or pick up Italian politics after World War II during their classes, if you do that you can feel the bad vibes starting. Teachers are obedient, that is how they got there. This is how the ideological control system perpetuates itself in the schools. Women are the vast majority of Italian teachers, I think even more than 80 per cent, because it is assumed that the most docile and controllable segment of the workforce is women and they are the most exploited too.